What Skinning Creates

Skinning creates pieces of leather and hides, in most cases. Sometimes it will result in scales or other parts. But since skinning always involves the body parts of creatures, it will always be something appropriate to that creature type.

What Skinning Requires

To skin, you must have a skinning knife in your inventory, which can be bought from any Trade Goods vendor. Additionally, you must fully loot a corpse before it will be considered "skinnable". You can only skin corpses of targets whose level is less than a fifth of your skinning level. (A skinning skill of 150 can skin up to a creature of level 30. ) To determine what level of creature/beast that
can be skinned with your current level divide your current skinning level by 5 and the resulting number is the maximum level of creature
that can be skinned. You can also skin corpses that were killed by other players, as long as those players fully looted the corpse first.

Is Skinning For Me?

Skinning is a gathering skill to help leatherworkers. It is also a popular skill for farmers since it does not require doing anything special other than an extra few seconds worth of looting time.

A skinner can make a decent amount of extra money for skinning. At the very least, skinning costs nothing besides some inventory space and using up one of your two professions. Leatherworkers typically need very large sums of leather and skins to make decent items from, so in spite of how easy it is to get a stack of 20 leather while casually doing something else, it does not tend to become grossly devalued.

The skinning profession allows for the skinning of some rare items at the higher skinning levels such as onyxia's scale which is used
in the creation of an onyxia scale cloak (needed for the blackwing lair raid instance) by leatherworkers.

Skinning Quests

Additional Information

There are 2 items in the game that act as skinning knifes as well as increase the player's skinning level by 10 -- Finkle's Skinner from the beast in UBRS (Upper Blackrock Spire) and the Zulian Slicer which drops from the tiger priestess in ZG (Zul'Gurub). In addition there is also a +5 skinning enchantment that can be added to gloves to increase a skinner's skill level. During pre-BC, skinners needed a skinning level of 315 to skin raid bosses such as Onyxia, which required both this enchantment and one of the two aforementioned items. Since the expansion has come out the items listed above are not necessary since the tradeskills have been increased to 375.

New in Wrath of the Lich King

Passive Buff

Skinners will get a passive buff based on the level of their skinning skill. There are 6 levels of the buff that seem to correspond with the 6 levels of the gathering skill (Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert, Artisan, Master, Grand Master).